The Pope is finally coming around to admitting what we have known for years: the church is filled with gay pedos. The Catholic church under this openly communist pope is now changing its long held policy that homosexuality is wrong.
Uncategorized
Useless Men
I read this over at Gunfreezone, and I am reminded of some things that happened around my own house.
A few years ago, when my wife still had a Nissan Altima, I was out on the driveway replacing its sway bar, which had snapped while she was driving it. The neighbor lady was at the end of the driveway while out walking the dog and said, “I always see you out here, fixing one thing or another. I wish my husband was handy. He doesn’t know how to fix anything.”
The husband of my tenants can’t fix a thing. He calls me over to do everything, even stuff that isn’t part of my responsibilities as landlord. He called me once because the sink in the kids’ bathroom wasn’t working. It turns out that one of the kids had turned off the water at the valve below the sink.
My electric recliner quit working when one of my grandkids was sitting in it. Investigation found that one of the wires had been cut in half by the mechanical workings of the chair. I soldered it back together and sealed it with electrical shrink wrap, good as new. One of my grandkids, who I let help me by holding the flashlight and handing me the tools, said: “That was cool. My dad doesn’t know how to fix stuff like that.”
It’s important to teach kids, especially young men, how to fix things. Don’t raise useless, soy sipping, video game obsessed, beta males. Don’t raise girls who are dependent on men for everything. The simple act of handing you tools and holding the flashlight when they are young teaches them a lot.
Raising children is more than just sitting them in front of a video screen. Be a parent, a dad, a mom. Actually PARENT your children.
Account and INFO Security
Phishing Ads
Just when you think you are done talking about information security for awhile, the bad actors come along and prove you wrong. The latest is that black hats are targeting users of valuable sites with phishing ad and search engine results on Google and other search engines. The scam is that you search for your favorite website’s login, and the first hit is a phishing site that grabs your login information before forwarding you to the legit site.
In this case, it is users of the password manager “Bitwarden” and 1password that are the targets, but I have seen reports of similar attacks with other password managers, banking sites, and others. Recent research has shown that threat actors are using Google ads to fuel their malware delivery campaigns for initial access to corporate networks, to steal credentials, and for phishing attacks.
What’s interesting to me is that Google, YouTube, and other sites are busy clamping down on reports of the 2020 election, COVID vaccines, and everything else under the sun, but are actively allowing ads on their sites that are actual theft.
The best defense to this is the use of MFA that uses FIDO 2.0 or higher. The article that I linked to above says that hardware keys are cumbersome, but I have thus far found them easy to use, and certainly no more difficult than the authenticator apps that are out there. Another thing the article gets wrong is that all MFA is subject to “man in the middle” attacks. That may be true of authenticator and SMS versions of MFA, but the YubiKey system is not subject to man in the middle attacks, because the system uses the two keys of public key encryption to ensure that both parties are legitimate. I am sure that other hardware keys are available that do the same thing, I just have no experience with them.
You will note that Microsoft warned of this back in July and recommended the use of FIDO (Fast ID Online) 2.0 protocols for MFA. This rules out many authenticator apps as well as SMS methods of MFA. Note that the YubiKey 5 uses FIDO 2.0.
Be very, very wary of the websites that you are using. The crooks are getting more and more inventive every day.
Antigun
Thousands of Rounds?
ATF should be called Agents That Fib. They are on the record as claiming someone with a Glock switch is capable of firing ‘thousands of rounds per minute’ from a Glock handgun. Anyone with gun knowledge knows that they are talking about cyclic rate when they say that a gun is firing 1,200 rounds per minute. That would require a weapon to have an unlimited supply of ammunition. It’s an attempt at dishonest manipulation of soccer moms.
“It turns a semi-automatic firearm into, essentially, a machine gun,” explained [ATF Agent] Estevan. “So, instead of one round being discharged from a firearm with the single pull of the trigger, when the switch is installed onto a firearm, you’re looking at 1,200 rounds with the single pull of the trigger within a minute.”
If you have to lie in order to make your point, perhaps your point isn’t worth making.
Communism
Pushing Back
The communists in this country have been reeducating our children into their dogma for decades. Florida’s Governor is out to change that. The NAACP is furious that he isn’t letting the College Board teach a course in African American studies that covers such weighty topics as Black Queer studies and Reparations. They are demanding that the College Board not allow any AP courses to be taught in the state until DeSantis caves. I don’t think that they realize just how many students in Florida there are, and how much money is at stake. Enough that the College Board is rewriting the course to remove some of the objectionable material.
Who cares what the NAACP thinks? They are a communist front, disguised as a racial movement. They might as well call it Negroes About Advocating Communist Propaganda.
The left also forgets that state colleges receiving funding from the taxpayers of Florida are run by trustees who are appointed by the Governor. The trustees of the most liberal state college in Florida, so liberal that it doesn’t give grades or even require attendance, have been replaced by ultra conservatives.
Times, they are a changin’, at least in Florida, and the left can’t stand it. DeSantis is playing the same game that the left has been playing for years.
economics
Inflation Report
A friend of ours who owns a bakery reports that the wholesale price of eggs that she paid was $0.82 per dozen last January. Her price today is now $4.28. That’s a 480% price increase, year over year.
Education
Accommodations, Certifications, and Standards
A diploma, whether it is for high school, medical school, or barber college, is a certification from the school that issued it. That diploma states that the school is certifying that the person thereupon named has met the standards for that diploma. Or have they?
Nowadays, that isn’t what a diploma means. It was decided years ago, with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that it was unfair and discriminatory to treat students with intellectual disabilities (what used to be referred to as retarded) the same as other students. So this law was passed to make things more equitable. (Not equal, which is the same standard, but equitable, meaning that they have the same outcome.)
In order to make students with disabilities more likely to have the same outcome, they are granted accommodations. These accommodations can vary. It can mean that they are granted extra time, or are allowed to test in a private room with no one watching them, or that they are even give multiple choice tests with one or more of the wrong choices eliminated. Furthermore, the law goes on to say that there can be no mention of the accommodations on the student’s transcript, diploma, or other certifications. Don’t want them having the stigma of people thinking they had it easier than other students, you see.
As a result, not every student is being evaluated by the same standard. This means that a diploma is no longer a certification, as there is no guarantee that two students who have received that diploma were measured against the same yardstick. Remember that next time you are having your hair cut or being treated by a healthcare professional.
There was a student in my nursing class who received the accommodation of testing in a private room, and was also allowed to have her cell phone in the room with her. She graduated with a 94% test average, the highest in the class. I wonder why. No one on staff could challenge her on it, or she would scream about IDEA and racial discrimination.
The same happened when I was a teacher. All a student needed was a letter from a physician, saying that a student had a learning disability, and the student got all kinds of accommodations. There were some families who had 4 or 5 kids, all with extensive accommodations. It’s the newest way to get your kid that high GPA they’ve always wanted.
It doesn’t just extend to the classroom. Even licensing exams are given with accommodations. The implications are obvious. Your doctor or nurse might be wholly unable to provide you with competent care, but at least we didn’t hurt their feelings by making them seem inadequate.
This also makes licensure and the certification that goes with it wholly worthless.
economics
If the Test Were Valid…
A group of 25 people were caught forging transcripts from shuttered south Florida nursing schools. They were using the forged transcripts in a scheme to show eligibility to sit for nursing licensing exams.
I’m torn on this. If the exam were a valid measure of the knowledge and skills of the nursing profession, then why does it matter whether or not you went to a nursing school? Alternatively, if passing grades in the school were a reliable indicator of proficiency, then why have a licensing exam?
This is simply a continuation of our licensing discussion. The transcript is a certification- the school is certifying that you are proficient. With that being the case, why require an exam? Are you saying that the school’s certification isn’t reliable? Or is it the exam that isn’t reliable?
Or is this simply a money making scheme that allows colleges, testing centers, and the state to rake in thousands of dollars from each nursing candidate?
There are nursing schools that charge upwards of $50,000 for an associate’s in nursing. Many nursing programs have completion rates that are below 50 percent. That is, less than half of the nursing students who begin the program actually complete it. On top of that, less than 60 percent of those who complete nursing programs in south Florida actually pass their certification exams. That means less than a third of students who begin nursing education in south Florida wind up becoming nurses.
My own nursing school had a 45 percent completion rate and a 90 percent exam pass rate. That works out to about 40 percent, and doesn’t include those students who began the prerequisites but were never admitted to the school.
That’s why there is such a nursing shortage. For every 100 students who begin the nursing pipeline, only about 25 of them actually become nurses.