Make your own record player: A simple project with a profound lesson



We live in a scaled-up, real-world version of the classic children’s board game “Mousetrap.” The built world is over-engineered, too interdependent, and so precarious that a slight disturbance might bring the whole thing down.

The interconnected, precarious Rube Goldberg contraption that is modern society has more than just rolling balls and baskets and levers. Our real, physical-world interdependencies include reliance on digital algorithms and computing devices that no one can intuitively understand. It’s the worst of both worlds, physical and electronic.

This is a real-world lesson in physics and mechanics that teaches universal principles that can never be altered by whim or historical vogue.

A friend’s internet service went out recently. Even though she was able to get a human staff member on the phone, that human wouldn’t talk to her to even confirm that the company recognized that she was a paying customer.

Why? Because she couldn’t log in to her email on another device and recite a “one-time code.” Remember, she was calling because she didn’t have internet access. Cell signals in rural states are often insufficient for internet use. You see the problem.

Everything is like this, but everyone is acting like this is the way things have always been. It’s not true. There is no reason to live this way. It is not a natural law. The overcomplicated world is not something that just “happened.”

This setup is a result of choices. Disconnected choices, yes. There’s no central mind that has created our society. There’s no single controlling cabal that has engineered the way we live, communicate, procure food, or any of that. There are powerful interests, legal and commercial, that influence our society more than you and I as individuals can influence it. But it’s not a conspiracy in the classic sense. It’s a result of accumulated errors. We need a reset.

Memories of the analog world

1979. My family slipped away from Tully, New York, in the dead of night by means of my grandmother’s silver Buick Electra. The Buick told you that she had a V-8 through the distinctive muffled bass rumble from twin tailpipes. She was what I call an “honest mechanical.”

We boarded the Amtrak to cross the country so my stepfather, a glassblower who specialized in making electrodes, could find a job. There was nothing left for a working-class man in Upstate New York in the 1970s.

On arrival in Los Angeles, my Uncle Lee and Aunt Sherry were waiting in a 1979 lemon-yellow Cadillac Coupe de Ville. A Cadillac. I was going to ride in a Cadillac!

The trunk mechanism on my Uncle Lee’s Cadillac was my first introduction to what I would later think of as overcomplicated or dishonest mechanicals. It did this amazing thing I had never seen before. The trunk lid raised and lowered all by itself, untouched by human hands. After my mother loaded the last suitcase into the cavernous trunk, the enormous yellow deck lid silently, slowly crept downward. When the lid reached the latch, the mechanism slowed down to a crawl to give you a “soft and silent” latch.

Today, my base-model Toyota has all those bells and whistles plus more. The “more” is the irritating part. Nothing in the car is controlled mechanically or directly. Everything is drive-by-wire. The car decides when to spin the wheels when stuck in snow, even though I could do a better job if I were allowed to control the traction. Even the heater fan and lights are programmed to slowly, softly ramp up and ramp down, as if a too-sudden onset of sound or light would strike the driver with apoplexy.

Man and machine

The legend of John Henry both horrified and fascinated me as a child. The steel-driving man of folklore tried to prove he was as good as the new-fangled steam drill at chipping out a tunnel to lay track. John Henry swung his sledgehammer until his muscle fibers broke and he died exhausted on the ground, while the steam piston kept reciprocating.

I understood that this tale from America's railroad age was really about our present. It was obvious to me even as a kid in the 80s: Machines were crowding out the men. The mechanization of work inverted our values; humans had to live up to the demands and preferences of machine logic, not the other way around.

John Henry’s last act was a way of saying, “I am a man, and I live.”

RELATED: America needs mechanics; here's where to apply

Getty Images/Heritage Images

Honest mechanicals

Honest mechanicals are machines that can be observed, understood, and intuited. They show their works; nothing is hidden from the hands or the eyes. Compare honest mechanicals to modern digital devices. Call those devices “black boxes” whose function cannot be observed, understood, intuited, or reverse-engineered by human senses alone.

Black boxes (computers of various sorts) are not mechanicals at all. They don’t have levers or pulleys or counterweights, or sprockets, or escapements. They have invisible states of magnetic orientation. You cannot see the works with your eyes, and the complexity of a chipset is beyond the human mind’s ability to grasp.

A piece of photographic film with a light-sensitive emulsion that forms an image is an honest mechanical. The image is readable by the human eye.

A .jpg picture file is a black box. The image cannot be read or intuited by humans without another black box we call a computer.

A steam locomotive is an honest mechanical. Observe that you can understand how the machine turns heat into steam, turns steam pressure into lateral force, and then translates lateral force into rotary motion, thus moving the train and its passengers along.

You can intuit an honest mechanical. And if you have children, especially boys, I recommend that you introduce them to honest mechanicals. Show them how steam engines work. Show them a cutaway of an internal-combustion automobile engine. Let them take apart a blender or a stand mixer to see how electric motors produce rotary motion.

Here’s an easy hands-on lesson you can and should do with your kids, starting at about age 4. It doesn’t matter that the lesson uses “obsolete” technology. That is a benefit. This is a real-world lesson in physics and mechanics that teaches universal principles that can never be altered by whim or historical vogue.

Make your own record player

Materials:

  • 1 33 and 1/3 long-playing record album — one that’s scratched that you don’t care about
  • 1 #2 pencil
  • construction paper
  • Scotch tape
  • 1 sewing needle

Instructions:

Form the construction paper into a cone and tape together. Tape the sewing needle securely to the small end of the cone. Think of an old gramophone with a needle attached to a brass horn — that’s what you’re doing.

Put the pencil inside the center hole of the record. Spin the record like a toy top, and help your kid lower the needle-in-a-cone onto the guide groove at the edge of the record.

Magically, you’ll hear the sound on the record, slightly amplified by the paper cone. Sure, it’ll be at the wrong speed, and maybe you won’t be able to parse the words. But you and your kid will immediately understand basic sound recording and reproduction. You will understand that sound can be transcribed as a wave form that can take real-world, physical form in the bumps and pits of a piece of material.

Most importantly, your child will understand that the material world actually exists and that it is analog.

This matters. It matters more than you probably know. Modern young people have grown up in a world of portable computers and phone screens that appear to show them reality, but that do nothing but arrange points of light into virtual simulations. Have you noticed that young Millennials and younger seem not only put off and frightened by simple mechanical technology — mechanical telephones, cars that use a clutch and a gear shift — but almost disgusted and embarrassed by devices from just a generation ago?

This is not merely the universal plaint of the old about the shortcomings of the young. The world today is different to an extreme degree from the world of just one or two generations ago. Young people don’t know how to get around town without GPS, they’re frightened to get driver’s licenses at 16, and few can even whip up a basic meal on a stovetop. Why would they know these things when they’ve been reared to believe that food and transportation just “happen” by sliding your fingers along an iPhone touchscreen?

Do what you can to ground yourself (first) and your kids and grandkids back inside the real, physical, material, analog world. Remember what John Henry knew: We are men and women, and we live.

Virtual schooling a viable alternative? Thank woke teachers, school closures, and AI



There is a revolution under way in American education that has prompted pearl-clutching on the part of establishmentarians and excitement among families frustrated with the status quo.

The Trump administration's shake-up at the Education Department, the president's war on DEI, and recent successes on the school-choice front certainly have changed the game, particularly where brick-and-mortar schooling is concerned. The revolution, however, is also being waged online, where disruptors are challenging expectations regarding what is possible for at-home instruction.

The Oklahoma State Department of Education announced on Tuesday that it is partnering with the American Virtual Academy, a fully online K-12 preparatory school that is now in the approval process for tuition to be paid for by the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit program and apparently already has approval for school choice scholarships in several other states.

"Left-wing indoctrination in schools poses a serious threat to our students, and parents deserve more options for their kids," OSDE Superintendent Ryan Walters said in a statement. "We are proud to be one of the first states in the country to do this."

The school's president, Damian Creamer, recently spoke to Blaze News about his academy and about the environment that made this alternative both viable and desirable for some families.

Creamer noted that the pandemic was "very much an eye-opener for a lot of people — getting an inside peek into what is actually going on in the public school system."

RELATED: America's largest teachers' union declares war on the Trump administration, will use kids as foot soldiers

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

When the classrooms were shuttered and schooling temporarily went online, largely at the urging of teachers' unions, parents across the country were afforded a glimpse into the kinds of leftist propaganda being fed to their kids. It is hard to overstate how much this drove the popular backlash in recent years over DEI, critical race theory, and other forms of wokeness.

"The families are saying, 'Hey, that's not what we signed up for, and that's not what we expect. We want our kids to be taught how to think critically. We want them to learn how to read. We want them to learn how to write. We want them to learn arithmetic,'" said Creamer. "Yes, education is where minds are shaped — and if you're going to shape our child's mind, you better make sure that you're not going against our values as a family."

These concerns have prompted many Americans to turn to at-home instruction, which is reportedly America's fastest-growing form of education.

According to the National Home Education Research Institute, there were 3.1 million homeschooled K-12 students in the 2021-2022 school year, up from 2.5 million in spring 2019. Forbes indicated last year that estimates put the number of American homeschooled students at nearly 4 million kids nationwide. As multiple states do not require notification when parents decide to educate their children at home, the number might be much higher.

'We had to get moderation in there quickly.'

The National Center for Education Statistics revealed in a September 2023 publication that the top reasons parents gave in a 2019 survey for homeschooling were: concerns about the school environment; to provide religious instruction; to provide moral instruction; to emphasize family life together; dissatisfaction with schools' academic instruction; to provide a nontraditional approach to education; and/or to help with their child's special needs.

The spike in recent years also appears to have been driven by ruinous school closures, sporadic teachers' union strikes, and the politicization of the classroom.

The AVA started off as the Bridge School, which Creamer indicated had initially catered to athletes and child actors, providing those with roving lifestyles individualized, remote learning solutions. The AVA, however, has a distinctly conservative orientation.

Creamer noted that the idea behind the AVA was not only to provide kids with a high-quality education based on a research-based curriculum and to jettison the customary leftist gobbledygook but to help prepare a generation of productive citizens: "Let's teach them how to be great Americans. Let's teach them to love their country. Let's teach them about the founding principles of our country."

While there are many options when it comes to at-home instruction, Creamer, whose online charter school Primavera is presently in hot water over student test scores, suggested that the unstructured "nomad" style — where parents effectively ad-lib instruction on the go — isn't for everyone.

Some of the families exploring the educational landscape where "there really is no rhyme or reason" may alternatively "choose a virtual school like American Virtual Academy where it's a fully accredited school; it's got a curriculum that's going to lead to a diploma" qualifying them to get into college, he said.

When asked about whether AVA has any plans to get students engaged socially, especially given the risk of isolation when leaving in-person learning, Creamer told Blaze News, "We do, and they socialize every day in the school."

Utilizing AVA's proprietary platform, students and parents alike form pods and clubs, and all of the academy's teachers have their own homerooms. However, just like in the physical classroom, there are rules online.

"Everything is moderated — has to be moderated. Just trust me, we've done it where it wasn't moderated, and that was bad. We had to get moderation in there quickly," said Creamer.

In addition to online social engagements, AVA is planning get-togethers in the real world, including a family, faith, and freedom day event in Arizona, and field trips to the nation's capital as well as to places of civic and historical consequence.

While providing opportunities for student and parent interaction, Creamer noted that "a lot of parents are putting their kids into virtual school because of the socialization" at school — because they don't want their kids getting "into things they don't want their kids to be involved with."

Creamer, who is also the CEO of the e-learning company StrongMind, noted that digital learning is particularly viable now on account of artificial intelligence.

"When the student sets up their profile, that profile — we're learning about the student," said Creamer. "We know where they're at academically. We're benchmark-testing the students so we can see, academically, what they know and what they don't know and where they're at grade level."

Extra to calibrating the learning experience on the basis of an individual student's academic strengths and weaknesses, AI agents can take into account the student's like, dislikes, and career aspirations and offer them a bespoke experience with the aim of maximizing engagement.

"Education like this is where we can start to really move the needle now," said Creamer.

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Iconic 'You wouldn't steal a car' ad allegedly contained pirated content: 'Just precious'



Americans keen to watch a movie on DVD have in years past frequently been confronted with a compulsory anti-piracy ad equating the unlawful digital acquisition of a film to grand theft auto. Moviegoers occasionally had to sit through the same jarring ad in theaters. In an ironic twist, the iconic font flashed repeatedly at would-be pirates in dark rooms across the country may itself have been pirated.

The ad, which has been parodied numerous times including by "The IT Crowd" TV series, was created by the Motion Picture Association of America in conjunction with Britain's Federation Against Copyright Theft and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore. It debuted in theaters around the world and on home entertainment in July 2004.

At the outset, it shows a teenage girl downloading a pirated film on a desktop computer. The ad then runs through a sequence of dramatized crimes broken up by white text on black background telling prospective digital pirates that they would not similarly engage in other forms of theft: "You wouldn't steal a car"; "You wouldn't seal a handbag"; "You wouldn't steal a television"; "You wouldn't steal a movie."

Finally the ad states, "Downloading films is stealing — is against the law. Piracy. It's a crime."

The corresponding print campaign, which used the same font, insinuated a link between "DVD piracy and serious crime," highlighting cases where pirated DVDs were found in the possession of unsavory characters including an illegal alien and drug traffickers.

Bluesky user Rib noted last week that the font used throughout the ad "was a pirated clone (XBAND Rough) of a real font (FF Confidential)."

'The campaign has always had the wrong tone.'

Rib explained that by using the font editing software FontForge on a PDF from the ad campaign's website, he was able to confirm "they are indeed using the illegal clone version of the font, rather than the licensed one!"

Sky News subsequently conducted its own investigation. After replicating the process, the network drew the same conclusion: The piracy ad's font was pirated.

The British news site noted, however, that there was no evidence to suggest the campaign's designers were aware that the font was pirated, adding that copies of the pirated font were widely circulated in the early 2000s.

Dutch type designer and software developer Just van Rossum told Sky News, "I had known about the 'illegal clone' of my font before, but I didn't know that that was the one used in the campaign."

Van Rossum confirmed to Melissa Lewis, a reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting, that XBAND Rough "is indeed an 'illegal clone' of FF Confidential."

"The campaign has always had the wrong tone, which (to me) explains the level of fun that has been had at its expense," said van Rossum. "The irony of it having used a pirated font is just precious."

Neither America's Motion Picture Association nor the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore responded to Sky News' requests for comments. The Federation Against Copyright Theft declined to comment, indicating the campaign predated anyone now working at the organization.

Van Rossum told TorrentFreak that he has no intention of taking action, as he is no longer the font's official distributor. The licensing is reportedly now handled by the American digital typesetting company Monotype.

This is not the first time an anti-piracy ad came off sounding like hypocrisy.

The Foundation for the Protection of the Rights of the Entertainment Industry of the Netherlands asked Dutch musician Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for another anti-piracy video in 2006.

Wired reported that the following year, Rietveldt discovered that his music was being used on a globally distributed "Harry Potter" DVD without his permission. His music had actually been used on at least 70 different commercial DVDs.

Years later, an Amsterdam court fined Rietvedlt's music royalty collections agency, ordering the outfit to pay the musician the money owed him.

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Zuckerberg courted China, silenced Trump, and called it ‘neutral’



Mark Zuckerberg appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience” in January sporting a new hairstyle and a gold chain — an image makeover that began with the billionaire tech mogul sparring with MMA fighters in 2023. He cast himself as a reformed free-speech champion, admitting that under the Biden administration, Meta’s fact-checking regime had become “something out of '1984.'” Something, he said, needed to change.

What he didn’t say: Meta’s censorship playbook has long resembled the Orwellian dystopia he now claims to oppose.

‘Meta lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public.’

Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Meta has operated with "1984"-style control — censoring content, shaping political narratives, and cozying up to authoritarian regimes, all while pretending to remain neutral. While Zuckerberg criticizes China’s digital authoritarianism, Meta has adopted similar strategies here in the United States: censoring dissent, interfering in elections, and silencing political opponents.

Whose ‘shared values’?

Zuckerberg’s hypocrisy is increasingly obvious. His ties to China and Meta’s repeated attempts to curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party expose a willingness to bend democratic principles in the name of profit. Meta mimics China’s censorship — globally and domestically — even as it publicly condemns the CCP’s control over information.

For years, Meta attacked China’s censorship and human rights abuses. But as China-based tech companies gained ground, Zuckerberg’s rhetoric escalated. He warned about Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek, which were producing superior tools at lower costs. In response, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan assured Americans that the company would build AI based on “our shared values, not China’s.”

Zuckerberg even declared he’d partner with President Trump to resist foreign censorship and defend American tech. But that posturing collapses under scrutiny.

Behind the scenes, Zuckerberg worked hard to ingratiate himself with the Chinese regime. As Steve Sherman reported at RealClearPolicy, Meta pursued “Project Aldrin,” a version of Facebook built to comply with Chinese law. Meta even considered bending its privacy policies to give Beijing access to Hong Kong user data. To ingratiate himself with the CCP, Zuckerberg displayed Xi Jinping’s book on his desk and asked Xi to name his unborn daughter — an offer Xi wisely declined.

These overtures weren’t just about market share. Meta developed a censorship apparatus tailored to China’s demands, including tools to detect and delete politically sensitive content. The company even launched social apps through shell companies in China, and when Chinese regulators pressured Meta to silence dissidents like Guo Wengui, Meta complied.

On April 14, an ex-Facebook employee told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism that Meta executives “lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public.”

Political meddling at scale

After the Trump administration moved to block Chinese tech influence, Meta backed off its China ambitions. But the company didn’t abandon censorship — it just brought it home.

In the United States, Meta began meddling directly in domestic politics. One of the most glaring examples was the two-year ban on President Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram. Framed as a measure against incitement, the decision reeked of political bias. It showed how much power Zuckerberg wields over American discourse.

Then came the 2020 election. Meta, under pressure from the Biden administration, suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story — a move Zuckerberg himself later admitted. Though the story was legitimate, Facebook and Twitter labeled it “misinformation” and throttled its reach. Critics saw this as an obvious attempt to shield Biden from scrutiny weeks before Election Day.

Meta’s interference didn’t stop at content moderation. It also funded election infrastructure. Zuckerberg donated $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life and another $50 million to the Center for Election Innovation and Research. These funds were funneled into swing states under the guise of pandemic safety. But critics viewed it as private influence over public elections — a dangerous precedent set by one of the most powerful CEOs in the world.

Meanwhile, Meta executives misled the public about the company’s relationship with China.

Beyond corporate hypocrisy

Zuckerberg’s deference to China wasn’t a phase — it was part of a long-term strategy. In 2014, he wrote the foreword for a book by Xi Jinping. He practiced Mandarin in public appearances. He endorsed Chinese values in private meetings. This wasn’t diplomacy — it was capitulation.

Meta even designed its platform to comply with CCP censorship. When regulators in China asked the company to block dissidents, it did. When Chinese interests threatened Meta’s business model, Zuckerberg yielded.

So when he criticizes China’s authoritarianism now, it rings hollow.

Meta’s behavior isn’t just a story of corporate hypocrisy. It’s a case study in elite manipulation of information, both at home and abroad. Zuckerberg talks about free speech, but Meta suppresses it. He warns of foreign influence, while Meta builds tools that serve foreign powers. He condemns censorship, then practices it with ruthless efficiency.

Americans shouldn’t buy Zuckerberg’s rebrand. He wants to sound like a First Amendment champion on podcasts while continuing to control what you see online.

Meta’s past and present actions are clear: The company interfered in U.S. elections, silenced political speech, and appeased authoritarian regimes — all while pretending to stand for freedom.

Zuckerberg’s censorship isn’t a glitch. It’s the product. And unless Americans demand accountability, it will become the new normal.

ORTNER: Meta’s Free Speech Makeover And The Fight For Digital Free Speech

'It is very difficult for the United States to stand up for free speech when it is itself interfering with that very freedom'

Bill Gates pushes for digital IDs to tackle 'misinformation' and curb free speech



Bill Gates has evidenced, both directly and through his foundation, an intense desire to shape public health, the news landscape, education policy, AI, insect populations, American farmland, the energy sector, foreign policy, and the earth itself. He recently hinted that he would also like to see free speech and engagements online shaped to his liking.

CNET asked Gates about what to do about "misinformation" — a topic explored in his forthcoming Netflix docuseries and some of his blog posts. The billionaire answered that there will be "systems and behaviors" in place to expose content originators.

The online environment Gates appears to be describing is some sort of digital ID-based panopticon.

Gates suggested that the "boundary between ... crazy but free speech versus misleading people in a dangerous way or inciting them is a very tough boundary."

"You know, I think every country's struggling to find that boundary," said Gates. "The U.S. is a tough one because, you know, we have the notion of the First Amendment. So what are the exceptions? You know, like yelling 'fire' in a theater."

The billionaire has previously hinted at the kinds of speech he finds troubling.

For instance, in a January 2021 MSNBC interview, Gates took issue with content encouraging "people not to trust the advice on masks or taking the vaccine."

When fear-mongering about potential "openness" on Twitter following its acquisition by Elon Musk, Gates intimated the suggestions that "vaccines kill people" and that "Bill Gates is tracking people" were similarly beyond the pale.

Gates, evidently interested in exceptions to constitutionally protected speech, complained to CNET that people can engage in what others might deem "misinformation" under the cover of anonymity online.

"I do think over time, you know with things like deep-fakes, most of the time you're online, you're going to want to be in an environment where the people are truly identified," continued Gates. "That is they're connected to a real-world identity that you trust instead of people just saying whatever they want."

The online environment Gates appears to be describing is some sort of digital ID-based panopticon.

Gates has backed various efforts to tether people to digital identities.

Gates' foundation has, for instance, been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a program called the United Nations Development Program-led 50-in-5 Campaign, which features a strong focus on digital ID.

The UNDP said in a November 2023 release, "This ambitious, country-led campaign heralds a new chapter in the global momentum around digital public infrastructure (DPI) — an underlying network of components such as digital payments, ID, and data exchange systems, which is a critical accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)."

Return previously reported that the Gates-backed Gavi, also known as the Vaccine Alliance, Mastercard, and NGOs in the fintech space have been trialing a digital vaccine passport in Africa called the Wellness Pass.

This vaccine passport, characterized as a useful way to track patients in "underserved communities" across "multiple touchpoints," is part of a grouping of consumer-facing Mastercard products aimed ostensibly at bringing people into a cashless digital ID system that both automates compliance with prescribed pharmaceutical regimens and fosters dependency on at least one ideologically captive non-governmental entity.

Extra to funding research into biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots indicating vaccination status, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backed the World Health Organization's 2021 "Digital Documentation of COVID-19 Certificates: Vaccination Status" guidance, which discussed the deployment of a vaccine passport "solution to address the immediate needs of the pandemic but also to build digital health infrastructure that can be a foundation for digital vaccination certificates beyond COVID-19."

Whereas there remain ways online by which people can interact anonymously — including whistleblowers and persons whose employment situations might otherwise preclude them from freely expressing their views publicly — largely free from government or private clampdowns, Gates fantasized in his CNET interview about "systems and behaviors that we're more aware of. Okay, who says that? Who created this?"

According to CNBC, Gates is "sensitive" to concerns that restricting information online could adversely impact the right to free speech. Nevertheless, he still wants new rules established, though he did not spell out what those would entail.

However, he has, in recent years, given an idea of where he thinks the government crackdown should start.

Gates told Wired in 2020 that the government should now permit messages hidden with encryption on programs like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

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The Military Recruitment Crisis Mirrors America’s Changing Values

Dismal recruitment numbers are more than a Pentagon issue. They reflect our societal values, aspirations, and doubts.

How to break free from Big Tech slavery



Learning some arcane and challenging things is necessary to be truly literate in a topic, even if it seems a little outdated. For instance, many scholars say you can’t truly be literate in the Western canon without a knowledge of Latin.

Likewise, I would argue that you can’t be truly computer literate without at least a basic understanding of Unix. And you can’t be sovereign in a field without being literate, so you can’t be digitally sovereign without knowing Unix.

Some variants of Unix run most of the world’s servers, like the web server you’re reading this article on now. Unix is at the heart of Google’s search engine. If you’ve ever used an Android phone or an iPhone, you have unwittingly used a spinoff of Unix.

What is Unix?

But what is Unix? That can be tough to answer since, like a Portuguese man o' war, Unix isn’t a single, definable thing but a collection of things. Part of the Unix philosophy is to have a collection of small, modular, highly specialized bits of software that all work together.

At the heart of Unix is what’s known as the kernel, which is the very low-level software that runs the computer hardware. On top of that are the apps and utilities that you, the user, actually interact with. The kernel is Unix. The software that runs on top of the kernel is also Unix.

Unix was initially developed inside Bell Labs in the 1960s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, but it escaped the clutches of AT&T to create innumerable offshoots and offshoots of offshoots, all of which can collectively be referred to as Unix.

When Apple fired Steve Jobs in 1985, he founded a new company called NeXT that produced an operating system called NeXTSTEP based on — you guessed it — Unix. When Apple purchased NeXT in 1996, bringing Steve Jobs back into the fold, the company rebuilt Mac OS from NeXTSTEP, keeping the UNIX underpinnings. What was then known as Mac OS X was later refactored to power the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple TV, the Apple Watch, ad infinitum. Apple’s entire product line is built around Unix in some form.

Linux and the open-source revolution

Perhaps the most significant Unix spinoff, called Linux, was created by Finnish developer Linus Torvalds in 1991. What made Linux novel was its open-source philosophy. Linux was totally free to download and share. What it lacked in usability or technical support, it more than made up for by the simple fact that it was free.

Linux will never be a significant player on most ordinary people’s desktops. Something as simple as installing a printer can be a nightmare. But despite that, Linux’s free nature makes it the most ubiquitous operating system in the world. It’s an economical solution for giant server farms running thousands of servers. It’s flexible and cheap enough to deploy, running many small gadgets around your house.

The power of Unix

Stripped of its shiny commercial veneers, Unix is all about raw power. It’s fundamentally a command-line operating system by and for computer geeks. It’s a construction zone littered with tools, scaffolding, and power cords. Unix does not hold your hand and it does not suffer fools. With the right commands, it will happily let you destroy your entire hard drive without so much as an error message.

However, for those brave enough to conquer it, Unix holds unlimited power. And that power has been wielded by some of the most powerful men in the world, like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.

If you truly want to be the master of your digital destiny, you must venture into the dark depths of Unix.

How to try Unix

Running Unix on your computer once meant a difficult and treacherous Linux install. These days, you have multiple options for trying Unix from the comfort of a Windows PC or a Mac.

Since macOS is built on Unix, it’s as simple as opening the Terminal app, found in /Applications/Utilities. Or press Command-Space and type “terminal.”

At one time, Microsoft viewed Linux the same way the United States viewed the USSR. That’s changed, and the company now offers a baked-in way to install Linux alongside Windows in a single command called Windows Subsystem for Linux. It’s a little more complicated than on a Mac, but not by too much.

You can even access Linux on a Google Chromebook — since a Chromebook is just Linux with a Web browser slapped on top. Google offers a setting to access the Linux underpinnings.

Here’s your homework assignment: Investigate one of these options for your machine and make your way to a command prompt. But once you get there and the cursor blinks at you … then what?

Stay tuned. We’ll tell you what to do next. In the coming months, Return will be publishing simple guides to help all of us take back our digital sovereignty.

SEC chairman stunned by question about paying for Steele dossier for Hillary Clinton campaign



President Biden's Securities and Exchange Commission chairman appeared caught off guard by a Republican congressman's questions about his time on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The chairman was asked if he facilitated the payment for the infamous Christopher Steele dossier.

The Steele dossier was a document procured by an British ex-spy that claimed that former President Trump had colluded with Russian interests, along with claims that he participated in lewd sex acts in Russian hotels.

As reported by the Daily Wire, House Republican Byron Donalds questioned SEC Chairman Gary Gensler about whether or not he facilitated the payment for the dossier when he worked for Clinton's campaign.

"You were Hillary Clinton's CFO in the campaign, right?" Donalds asked.

"It's part of my history —" Gensler replied before Donalds interjected, "Were you, yes or no?"

"In 2016?" Gensler clarified.

"Did you facilitate the payment for the Steele dossier since you were CFO of the Hillary Clinton campaign?” the congressman asked.

Donalds continued to ask "yes or no?" repeatedly and finlly reminded the SEC chairman that he was under oath.

"It was not something I was aware of," Gensler answered before the congressman yielded his time.

\u201cA Rockstar with a MEGA BOMBDROP emerges! @RepDonaldsPress WOWZERS!!!!\u201d
— Digital Asset Investor (@Digital Asset Investor) 1681846323

Gensler previously worked as under secretary of the Treasury for domestic finance during the Clinton presidency from 1999 to 2001. He also worked as the CFO for the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign.

The Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign were fined by the Federal Election Commission in 2022 for allegedly lying about funding the dossier. Clinton’s treasurer was fined $8,000 and the DNC’s treasurer $105,000.

The DNC paid over approximately $850,000 to Fusion GPS, the research firm behind the documents, while Clinton's campaign gave $175,000.

However, FusionGPS was originally hired by the Washington Free Beacon, according to the New York Times. The funding was provided to find dirt on several Republican candidates including Trump, but later ceased in May 2016 once it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination.

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Report: Scientists can now control lightning with lasers



Humanity now boasts the ability once attributed to mythological gods such as Zeus, Marduk, and Thor.

Scientists atop a Swiss mountain proved themselves capable of steering lightning bolts using lasers, effectively deflecting four lightning strikes on a telecommunications tower.

While this field of research has been active for decades, physicist Aurélien Houard of the École Polytechnique and his team documented the first experiment that demonstrates the efficacy of lightning guidance using lasers.

Where there's thunder, there may be lasers

In a study published Monday in the academic journal Nature Photonics, researchers discussed how laser-induced beams of light, formed in the sky via intense and repeated laser pulses, can guide lightning bolts over considerable distances.

The scientists experimented on the Säntis mountain in northeastern Switzerland during the summer of 2021 with a "high-repetition-rate terawatt laser."

They set up this 1.5 meter by 8 meter laser, weighing in at over three tons, nearby a telecommunication tower that is struck by lightning over 100 times a year.

The scientists activated their laser as a lightning rod "with a propagation path passing in the vicinity of the top of the [telecommunication] tower" during thunderstorms, as seen here:

\u201cLaser beam used to successfully divert lightning strikes!\nA laser lightning rod has been placed at a Swiss mountain top to protect telecommunication towers! The laser is 6x more effective than standard lightning rods! \u26a1\ufe0f\n#TechNews #laser #lightning\u201d
— Digital Daze (@Digital Daze) 1673977526

The telecommunication tower, itself equipped with a lightning rod, was struck by 16 lightning bolts between July 21 and Sept. 30, 2021. Only four of these strikes occurred during the 6.3 hours the scientists had their laser operational and targeting the thunderclouds above.

In all four cases, the laser reportedly steered the lightning discharges.

According to the Guardian, the laser steers the lightning flashes by "creating an easier path for the electrical discharge to flow along."

"When very high power laser pulses are emitted into the atmosphere, filaments of very intense light form inside the beam," Jean-Pierre Wolf, one of the study's authors, told Sky News. "These filaments ionise nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the air, which release electrons that are free to move. This ionised air, called plasma, becomes an electrical conductor."

The scientists indicated that snapshots of one of the events showed "that the lightning strike initially follows the laser path over most of the initial 50 m distance."

According to the study, this achievement "will lead to progress in lightning protection and lightning physics."

The Hill reported that there were nearly 198 million lighting events in the U.S. in 2022, which altogether claimed the lives of 19 people. The ability to divert and/or steer lightning could therefore be lifesaving.

"This work paves the way for new atmospheric applications of ultrashort lasers and represents an important step forward in the development of a laser based lightning protection for airports, launchpads or large infrastructures," wrote the researchers.

Whereas the "laser conditions" in this experiment had a length of at least 30 meters, Sky News noted that future devices could extend a ten-meter lightning rod by 500 meters, offering far more protection.

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