WASHINGTON (AP) — The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.

Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.

Harvard president quits: Claudine Gay resignation highlights new conservative weapon | AP News

In high school, I had a Literature teacher who made us do a book report which included the bio of the author, the historic time frame when the book was written, any background on why he/she wrote it and then analyzing the book itself plus our conclusions. It was to be 30% of our total grade and we had 6 months to write it. She gave us a long class on quotations including how to keep track of them and to religiously notate them. When she finished that particular class, she looked at us and said “Some of you will be tempted to plagiarize somebody, please don’t. I read a lot and I have better sources than you.”

My paper was about Orwell’s 1984 (What a surprise, huh?) and I sweated bullets trying to get any material in Spanish. The teacher was generous and shared some of her stuff, but dumped a bunch of other material in English which forced me to live with a frigging English/Spanish dictionary while working on the report. I also got and gave help to bookworm buddies when we did our research in libraries: If we bumped on a book or periodical about a book we knew somebody else was working on, we would write it down and pass it along. Dude date was about a month and a half before school year’s end, we turned it in, and we eventually forgot about it as kids do.

The last Lit class was dubbed Massacre Day.   The teacher arrived with the stack of reports and a somber demeaning. She divided the works in three sub-stacks and proceeded to call the individuals one by one to come pick up their report while announcing the grade. The big stack was mostly C’s and some D’s caused by what she said was lousy/lazy work (She was a great teacher but a heartless scorer, we knew that already.) Then came the “medium” pile and she starts to call some of the “best and brightest” of the class and announcing their collective grades: Big fat F for plagiarizing material.

At this time, I realized I had not been called and neither most of my bookworm friends. Ther was about seven of us left and she call the whole lot to stand in front of the class. I was sick to my stomach wondering how bad I fucked up to be called up and what was lower than an F.  All of the guys in front but one had scored A’s and one guy B because of misspellings (I did forget to mention, we had to turn in out paper typed, and typewriters did not come with spellcheckers.)

Her last words for us were about the dangers of plagiarism. It was intellectual theft, and you would be treated as an intellectual criminal and a dishonest human being.  That day ws probably one of my best memories of high school and a teaching moment I never forgot.

Now I am sad to see her proud standard that she branded in our spirits is nothing more than a small impediment in today’s academia.

One of the topics that was suggested I write about was the idea of who was running on the Left. Here’s what I found out.

Joe Biden

He’s the sitting president. I’m not a fan. I firmly and sincerely believe that he has some form of dementia, and that his current use by others as a puppet amounts to elder abuse. I’m not joking, and it’s not snickering. While I didn’t like him before, I thought he was relatively well spoken and somewhat amusing. Today, I am concerned that having him as a sitting president makes me an abuser. For real. Whatever platform he’s running on, Biden is not actually actively a part of it. He’s a figurehead, and at this point, not even really that. I could outline that platform, but I don’t feel the need. It’s more of the same that we’ve already had, and we all know it’s not a good plan.

Marianne Williamson

She ran in 2020, but didn’t get far. She’s far Left in her words. She specifically wants “free” college, “free” healthcare, “free” childcare. She also wants a “living” minimum wage. I know that’s a lot of quotation marks, but I really don’t think she understands what the word “free” means. None of those things are OR CAN be free. The people providing the services have to be paid. That money has to come from somewhere. And a minimum wage that is country wide will never work because of the economic disparity between the various states (for instance, $9 an hour is enough to live on in many parts of the South, but isn’t even enough to get a nice box for under the motorway in New York). She talks much about “…ending the unjust system…” (from her video on her website). She does have a handful of decent ideas, such as giving corporations less power, but they’re so scattered that they simply are not viable.

Dean Phillips

He appears to be Biden Mark II. His big statement is he agrees with most of Biden’s policies, but Biden said he’d be a “transitional president” and step down after one term. Since Biden hasn’t done that, he’s standing up. He spends most of his videos talking about how other Dems don’t like him for rocking the boat or challenging Biden. Like all Dems, he wants universal health care and a minimum wage that pays well. He wants to “fix” the cost of living (but has no definitive plan on how to actually do that). He wants to cut military overreach, though I’m not really sure what that means. Basically he wants to audit them, and says that fixing the military is “simple.” He wants to reform education, but thinks that doing so is achieved by paying more to teachers. He doesn’t talk about any other ideas for reforming education; it’s all just because teachers are underpaid.

That’s it. That’s the whole Democratic field. Biden, who we already have ample experience with to know he’s bad for the country. Williamson, who is even more Left than Biden, and is also 74 years old. And Phillips, who is all pumped up and younger (54), but really has no idea about things. If I had to vote for someone on the Left, I’d vote for Phillips, only because he’s not as extreme as Williamson, and hopefully his handlers would be able to talk some sense into him.

I wish there was a strong Left candidate. I really do. I am firmly of the opinion that Trump, while not the demon the Dems would paint him as, would do more harm than good to the country if he were re-elected. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do for the United States of America, even if my beliefs aligned perfectly with his. He’s too polarizing, and I fear that it would cause an even larger schism. Because of the cult of personality that’s developed around him (both positive AND negative, btw), he cannot effectively lead. He would be stymied at every turn. When I look at the Left field, though, there is no one who could carry the country right now.

It’s been a while since I looked at Left runners for President. The last decent runner was Hilary Clinton. Not because I like her, because I do not, but because she’d at least have been effective. That’s part of what scared me so much about her, quite frankly. She would have made a difference, and it probably would have been a horrendously bad difference. But she’d at least have done it on purpose, and with her intellect intact. Biden doesn’t have that. If he wins, it’ll be only a micron less divisive than if Trump won, and the country will go down the shitter.

So there you have it. A “more left” view of the Left candidates.

TLDR: They all suck.

But this is just a bit too pushy.

“Come have enchiladas while discussing payment options for the disposal of your remains” is not the most positive mood to start the year.

There was a time when I had the luxury of going shopping for movies and music every Friday. The family would get in the car, and we would drive over to Circuit City and look through the new movie releases.

As we were looking through the movies, I heard a nice five string quartet on the store speakers. I asked what the group was, found the disk and went to purchase it.

My eldest daughter, a freshman in high school, took one look at the cover and accused me of buying the album because the cover art showed some fine ladies.

If this is a repeat, sorry.

Welcome to the beginning of another year of crisis.

One and a half years after the Supreme Court issued their opinion in the Bruen case, not a single Second Amendment challenge has been resolved. Every state that had Draconian infringements now has worse infringements.

After Bruen I was hoping to get a permit to carry in MA. That is not happening anytime soon.

The economy is the worse I’ve ever seen it. For the first time in my life, I’m stressing about bringing in enough money for the family.

We are already into the campaign process. I’m watching Biden hide in the basement, not bothering to campaign at all. Meanwhile, the media is attacking each of the Republican candidates in turn. It will only get worse.

I’ve decided on my next project, I just do a reasonable job of it.

It turns out that there are multiple different companies that sell trimmers for cutting cases to length. The issue is setting the distance to trim. Both Lee and Lyman have a system where a probe goes through the flash hole to bottom out on the case holder.

Those probes fit all the standard cutters.

The cutters have standard threads.

My project is a geared motor driving the trimmer. The connection will be via rubber pulley. The shaft will feed through the face and where a gear will be mounted. That will drive a distribution gear to drive three other shafts. Feeding back to the front where they will be drilled and tapped to take the standard case prep tools.

So, when setup and running, you will be able to trim a case to length, chamfer the outside, chamfer the inside and then mount the next case for processing. When doing the pockets, you can have up to four tools spinning. I figure a reamer, a normalizer, and a pocket hole cleaner.

It is all fun, I’ve got some Delrin rods to make gears from, looking forward to making this monster.

Happy New Years to you all.

Stay ready, stay prepared, have fun.