Article the twelfth… The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

What you just read is the 10th amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. It was an addition to the Constitution which was considered redundant because it was implied by the language of the rest of the Constitution, but was added anyway to satisfy those who didn’t want the Constitution’s intent to be vague.

The 10th amendment grants states significant authority to govern their own affairs, and limits the federal government’s ability to interfere.

You now have a better idea of how the USA is run. Why do I bring this up? Because, apparently, not everyone gets it. This includes Presidential hopeful, Joe Biden.

In a recent speech, and repeated in a political ad, Biden points out that the recent mayhem we’ve been seeing (from left-wing groups) are not legitimate protests. Sounds like something I can agree with.

But as the advert continues, Biden blames President Trump for the mayhem, saying that he’s not doing enough to stop it. In saying so, Biden indicates that he’s not aware of the 10th amendment, or how it’s applied.

What does Biden want, for Trump to send in the feds at the first sign of rioting? Is that how it should be handled? It would be great if states had their own institution for law enforcement, that could step in to restore the peace when things get tense. What would such an institution be called?

The police.

You know, The institution that radical leftists are going full-tilt to try to abolish, so there won’t be anyone to stop the looting.

So Trump can’t just send in the feds when state and city governors should be deploying the police. But (left-wing) governors seem hesitant to deploy police for some reason. So, what is Trump supposed to do?

One idea would be to make the offer to governors for the feds to be sent in to restore order. That way, the governors would have the opportunity to accept or decline assistance, and in either case, the President would be respecting the states’ 10th amendment protections.

Sounds like a great idea, right? As it so happens, that’s just what Trump has been doing, and (left-wing) governors have largely declined. Therefore, Democrat politicians are to blame for their failure to protect the people. And this they continue to do in spite of Trump’s repeated offers of assistance.

Kinda makes you want to vote out the governors that don’t want to cooperate with the President in bringing a bunch of dangerous marauders to justice.

I know it’s tempting to be hard on ol’ Joe, but please be understanding: How can we expect him to uphold the Constitution if he doesn’t know what it says?

It’s a sad thing, but left-wing rioters are making America a more dangerous place. Thankfully, there are many creative ways to defend your home, one of which involves a decent set of speakers.

Just a little disclaimer: Use this method responsibly. Do not use it to annoy kids in your neighborhood who are just taking it easy.

So, along comes Antifa, or BLM, or some other left-wing extremists, marching down the streets and threatening home invasions. You can deter them with sound, and here’s how you do it:

Play the following video, with the sound going to your speakers.

You might not hear it, if you’re a tad on the older side. However, younger people can hear it, and they can hardly stand it!

How does it work? The video plays a high-frequency sound wave (15khz). This high-pitch screech is highly annoying, to the point that many hearing it simply can’t concentrate. However, people lose the ability to hear at that frequency as they age. If you play this from your speakers, the younger rioters won’t be interested in hanging around, and the few older people among them would likely follow them away.

There are a few points about this to consider:

• If you’re on the younger side, you might not like it, either. You and your kids might want hearing protection.
• You might not hear it, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have some kind of effect on you.
• This should not be used to annoy kids that are minding their own business. Using this to harass people is likely illegal.
• The idea that this frequency drives mosquitoes away is a myth. It’s annoying to one kind of pest, but ineffective to another.
• Obviously, this won’t do more to protect you than your second-amendment implements.

So, there you have it. Use responsibly.

Remember when a conspiracy theory surfaced that now-President Donald Trump benefited from Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election? You likely do, seeing as the corporate media ran with it for a long time, in spite of having nothing to show for it, and nothing came of it but yet another waste of taxpayer dollars by Democrats.

So then, we’ve established that foreign meddling in an election is something that the left takes seriously.

With that in mind, consider a prank phone call that recently surfaced targeting Kamala Harris, currently running for VP alongside the presidential candidate, Joe Biden. The fact that she was pranked wasn’t as exceptional as what the prank revealed about her.

The pranksters were a pair of Russian comedians, with one of them posing as popular young environmentalist Greta Thunburg. During the phone conversation, the impersonator offered Kamala a likely-nonexistent recording of Donald Trump disparaging Greta’s efforts, suggesting that it could be of use to Kamala as she campaigns against the incumbent President. Not only did she accept, Kamala said that one of her associates would get in touch with her and work together with her.

Greta Thunberg isn’t an American; she’s Swedish. And Kamala Harris was willing to accept a recording the Swedish girl would have secretly acquired of words that the President spoke to her in confidence. Kamala Harris would have happily cooperated with a foreign entity interfering in an American election.

Of course, this is far from the scariest thing about Kamala Harris, who…

• Kept people incarcerated to exploit them for cheap labor, even paying them $1/hr to fight wildfires,
• Put parents of truants in legal trouble, then laughed at their distress,
• Attempted to prevent a DNA test of a man on death row when the test might have exonerated him, which it did,
• Then demonstrated her accountability by blaming her subordinates for the attempted obstruction.

There is a recurring pattern of abusing and exploiting those who are powerless to resist. While Kamala might not have necessarily been involved, it was the California prison system that decided to experiment on male juvies with involuntary estrogen treatments. Something seems to be viciously wrong with the California criminal justice system.

“Fail with honor rather than succeed by fraud.”
-Star Wars, The Clone Wars

I know that tech companies and social media platforms have oodles of coders that are out to justify their collective existences, but more should be done to prevent them from fixing what’s not broken.

If you’ve attempted to use WordPress lately, you might have had issues with widgets. That’s not as big a deal for me as the fact that the numerous tools used to edit a post have vanished into a non-intuitive interface, assuming that you can still access the media you’ve uploaded through all that mess.

What really stinks of turgid ethics is that to access the classic editor, you have to install it as a plugin. All that would take from you is $300 per year for their Business Plan.

It seems as though it’s not enough for WordPress to intersperse our content with gross-out ads, now they want us to pay to use an editor that we’ve been accustomed to for years.

I’m curious about who is desperate enough for the older, better editor that they’re willing to reward WordPress financially in spite of the fact that WordPress 5.5 is breaking sites.

Let’s consider some of the biggest mistakes that a person can make: In many cases it involves committing a crime. Or it might be investing too much in the wrong stock. Or hurriedly marrying someone only to find out that they’re abusive. Or buying a house in a crime-riddled neighborhood.

Those are some big mistakes, but here’s a whopper: majoring in Electronics Engineering Technology (EET).

If you’re planning on becoming an EET major, here’s an idea of what you can look forward to:

As you get into it, you might have the idea that you’re joining “the winning side”. It’s not like majoring in English or some other elective, you might tell yourself. This is STEM we’re talking about, which all the science people speak of as guaranteeing a bright future. Once they have you believing that, they have you indoctrinated, to the point that it will be hard to change your mind.

For example, if you’re considering an EET degree, you might see someone attempting to warn you against it and you might dismiss them as being someone who made some bad choices.

Once you begin the program, it might actually be the fight of your life. Most college programs flood their students with assignments, but your EET coursework will easily eclipse your rudie-poo electives in terms of difficulty and perhaps even volume. You’ll really be in for it if you have a professor who likes the idea of “weed-out courses” which are filled with arbitrarily advanced material early on in an effort to process out the less-serious students.

In a 25-student class, you’ll likely see a couple students drop in the first week. By the end of the first semester, the class is likely to have been reduced to nearly half, and usually only around eight or nine students make it to second year. Most of the ones left usually graduate.

In case you’re curious, the students that carry on typically make fun of the ones that don’t make it, in some cases as far as a year after they drop.

Considering the challenge involved, and how few students who attempt it actually graduate, one might imagine that there’d be a bright and sunny future awaiting the student that overcomes the hurdles. If that’s what you think, consider the following number:

17

That’s how much money that you could expect to make, in dollars per hour, putting an EET degree to use.

Are you in disbelief? I’ve held three jobs since graduation that paid about the same rate, and I’ve seen another student from my class in the same position, so it seems like that particular rate isn’t extraordinary for EET grads. For comparison, I met an auto mechanic in the 90’s who made more than that even before accounting for inflation. To make the matter hurt more, a grocery store near one of the places I worked at had advertised a non-managerial position that started at about $15/hr.

With that kind of money, you can pick between a car or a one-bedroom apartment. You might even be able to squeak by with both if the apartment is a slum and the car is used. But you’d probably find yourself doing as I’ve done: using the company’s free coffee as an appetite-suppressant so you’ll feel less tempted to spend more money on food.

While this is going on, your dad might wonder why you’re not buying a house, your mom might wonder when she’s getting grandkids out of you, you might feel tempted to convince your friends that everything’s fine, everything’s just fine, and you yourself might be struggling to make sense of what’s going on.

At that point, you’ll realize that you weren’t on the winning side. STEM majors don’t guarantee success, hard work doesn’t always lead to a desirable outcome, and it is possible to work yourself raw for years and have little to show for it. Kind of like with most degrees.

If you’re considering majoring in EET, don’t do it. If you love your children, don’t sign them up for it. As for me, I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I know that I thought EET was a great idea in the past, but sometimes a person’s opinion changes over time and when presented with more information. Obviously, my opinion is different, now.

“What society does to its children, so will its children do to society.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero

Two is a natural counting number, and is placed between the numbers one and three on a directly-incrementing number line composed solely of successive integers.

Two is the lowest-value prime number; it is the first in the sequence of natural numbers that cannot be divided by a natural number to achieve a quotient that is also a natural number.

An integer is considered to be “even” if the quotient of dividing it by two would be an integer. Two is the only even prime number.

Two holds the third position on the Fibonacci Sequence, the previous two positions on the sequence being two occurrences of the number one.

It is also the number achieved when adding the multiplicative identity number, one, to itself.

In algebra, an exponent of two is used when a term consisting of a combination of variables and constants is to be multiplied by itself. This is of practical application when finding the area of a square when the value of the length and width are determined to be equal.

In trigonometry, the square root of two is the length of the hypotenuse when the opposite and adjacent lengths of a right triangle are both equal to one.

Interestingly, two is the only non-zero number where the sum of adding it to itself is the same as the product of multiplying it by itself.

Two is the base number of the binary numbering system, wherein each significant digit has two possible values (zero and one), which is of foundational importance in computer science, where the smallest element of data storage has two permutations, a high state (represented by a 1), and a low state (represented by a 0). Machine code uses the base-2 number system, whereas the base-8 (octal) and base-16 (hexadecimal) number systems are used as shorthand ways to represent binary numbers. The base numbers of these number systems are powers of two.

Remember: 2 + 2 = 4