TECHNOLOGY: Shutting Down Traditional Phone Lines

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

https://cordcuttersnews.com/california-wants-to-stop-att-from-shutting-down-traditional-phone-lines/

California Wants to Stop AT&T From Shutting Down Traditional Phone Lines

By

Luke Bouma

on
June 19, 2026

in
All News, News

*** begin quote ***

California regulators have formally accused AT&T of providing false information to the Federal Communications Commission in an effort to discontinue service on its aging copper-based wireline telephone network, according to Arstechnica. The filing, submitted by the California Public Utilities Commission on June 15, 2026, challenges AT&T’s petitions to preempt state rules and end landline obligations affecting roughly 199,000 customers. This comes as AT&T and others have been shutting down DSL and traditional phone lines that run on copper in many states.

*** end quote ***

Sad to say but as a fat old white guy retired injineer, copper-based wireline telephone network, sometimes called POTS (plain old telephone service) is and was very reliable and cheap.  Power outages, tornados, and human stupidity aside, you picked up the phone and got “dial tone”.

Don’t forget the AT&T tradition of the operator dying at the switchboard to alert everyone of danger. 

And, the old AT&T Motto, “no service is so urgent, that we can’t take the time to do our job safely”.  Never mind the wags that amended it to “take time for coffee”.

It was a “widows and orphans” stock, until in their infinite wisdom Judge Green and the FCC (a captive of the mobile telephone industry) decided that AT&T and the Baby Bells should be “aborted”.   One casualty was the greatest national resource “Bell Labs”. Another was the millions of retirees who had —  whether they knew it or not —  dedicated their lives to providing the BEST national telephone service. 

Shame on the US Gooferment for allowing this to fail.

Argh!

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INSPIRATIONAL: My wife had to endure the old process … … 

Monday, June 29, 2026

https://openbionics.com/3d-printed-prosthetic-limbs-progress-in-prosthetics-challenges-in-access/

*** begin quote ***

At our Austin prosthetic clinic, upper limb specialist Travis Heins has seen firsthand how 3D printing can elevate the experience of receiving a prosthetic arm from a drawn-out series of appointments into a streamlined, more predictable process. Instead of multiple rounds of casting, adjustments and travel to and from the clinic, Travis uses digital models and printed test sockets to refine his patient’s fit in a fraction of the time. For families who often drive hours to reach a preferred clinic or rearrange work schedules for each appointment, these efficiencies matter.

“I print two test sockets from the same digital model, one based on conservative measurements and another designed for a more experimental fit,” he said. “Sometimes we end up going with the more aggressive modified one.”

*** end quote ***

My wife had to endure the old process … … 

… … (I’d say God’s replacement wife because the Universe knows how much I need help. And, it sounds disrespectful to say “second wife” and hurtful to refer to my sainted “first” wife as anything but the best thing that ever happened to me in my college days.  But enough distraction.) … … 

… … and the insurance company paid 60k$ and we had innumerable appointments for fittings.  And the end result sucked.  It was hard to get on and almost impossible for the two of us to get it off.  

AND most disturbing to her was that is looked like a man’s arm.

FMPOV the lack of an “elbow” was a terrible disaster.  

Maybe the new stuff will be better.

BUT, (and there is always a BIG butt), not in our lifetime.

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AI: What ClaudaAI (Claudia) can’t do — access Google Maps or saved places

Friday, June 26, 2026

*** begin quote ***

Dialogue – June 28, 2026

USER: Delete all New Jersey saved places in Google Maps

CLAUDE: I don’t have access to Google Maps or your saved places — there’s no Google Maps connector available to me.

To delete saved places in Google Maps yourself:

1. Open Google Maps and tap your profile icon
2. Go to Saved → Your lists
3. Open each list, find NJ places, tap the three dots on each, and select “Remove from list”

Or on desktop at maps.google.com, go to Saved in the left menu and manage from there. Unfortunately there’s no bulk-delete option in Google Maps — it has to be done one by one.

*** end quote ***

Argh!

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INSPIRATIONAL: One can judge from experiment or one can blindly accept authority

Thursday, June 25, 2026

<<FROM FACEBOOK>>
<< EDITOR ADDED DATE 2026-06-09>>

Via @S Kent Troy

*** begin quote ***

“There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.” — Robert A. Heinlein – Life-Line

*** end quote ***

It seems that we have had a belly full of “science by authority”.   The politicians and bureaucrats have no one else to blame but themselves for “vaccine skepticism”.  New item after news item keep “leaking out”, mostly via the inet, that destroy any credibility or “moral authority” they had.  

Personally, when the undertakers reported big stringy clots and health young athletic men started dropping like flies, I was “convinced” that the truth was being hidden like Hunter Biden’s laptop.   And, Fauci’s 6 foot rule and face masks for viruses just “confirmed” it for me.  It was all <synonym for excrement from a male cow> to cover a giant cash grab for cronies and a payday for Big Pharma, Hospitals, and insider trading politicians and bureaucrats!   Argh!

“My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me.” — George Carlin

“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.” — George Carlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0

“The word ‘bipartisan’ usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” — George Carlin

A plague on all their houses.  They have set back human civilization and progress a thousand years or maybe 3 generations for it to be forgotten.

Argh!

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DISCOURAGING: US needs a leader that would just say “no”!

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

https://internationalman.com/articles/when-ai-driven-deflation-collides-with-americas-debt-saturated-economy/

When AI-Driven Deflation Collides With America’s Debt-Saturated Economy

by Nick Giambruno
<< EDITOR ADDED DATE 2026-06-08>>

*** begin quote ***

In other words, the US would need a leader who—at a minimum—returns the federal government to a limited Constitutional Republic, closes the 800 military bases abroad, ends entitlements, kills the welfare state, and repays a large portion of the national debt.

*** end quote ***

The current 1.2T$ budget deficit, added 121T+ national debt, and the guesstimated 200T+ in unfunded liabilities that our posterity will have to deal with is staggering.  And, all the politicians and bureaucrats just keep spending along.

“Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.” –Herbert Hoover

“When in a hole, stop digging!” — old Wall Street maxim

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INTERESTING: Do human brains synchronize during empathic connection?

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

<<FROM TWITTER>>
<< EDITOR ADDED DATE 2026-05-09>> 

https://x.com/TeeplesCY/status/2052951182025588797?s=20

Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY

*** begin quote ***

Someone praying for you in another building can change your brain in real time. There is a study that proves it.

Researchers at North Hawaii Community Hospital placed 11 people inside fMRI scanners, fully isolated. In a separate building, spiritual leaders who knew them personally sent focused intentions toward them at random two-minute intervals. The receivers had no way to know when. Their brains lit up at the exact moments the senders focused on them. Specific regions associated with attention and awareness activated on cue. The odds of this happening by chance were less than one in seven thousand.

Most people have never heard of this. Here are three more.

Hand-holding and pain. Researchers placed 22 couples under EEG caps. When the woman was in pain and her partner held her hand, their brain waves synchronized. The more empathy he felt for her, the more their brains coupled. The more their brains coupled, the more her pain decreased. Touch combined with focused care produced a measurable analgesic effect. The lead researcher got the idea while holding his wife’s hand during the birth of their daughter.

Two brains in shielded rooms. A Mexican neuroscientist named Jacobo Grinberg ran a series of experiments at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Two participants meditated together for 20 minutes. Then they were placed in separate electromagnetically shielded rooms more than 14 meters apart. One participant was shown 100 random flashes of light. The other, hooked to an EEG with no sensory contact of any kind, registered matching brain-wave responses one out of every four flashes. Pairs who had not bonded showed nothing.

Group prayer. Andrew Newberg at Thomas Jefferson University has spent more than two decades scanning the brains of praying nuns, meditating monks, and chanting Sikhs. His imaging work shows a consistent pattern. The frontal lobes activate. The parietal lobes quiet. The effect amplifies in groups. Brains in shared prayer entrain to one another the way two pendulums swinging in the same room eventually fall into the same rhythm.

These studies measure what physically happens to the human nervous system when people focus caring attention on each other, in the same room or at a distance. The findings are consistent across labs, methods, and decades.

The basic finding, that human brains synchronize during empathic connection, is now mainstream neuroscience. Newberg alone has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers.

People have been doing this for thousands of years and calling it prayer. Christians alone offer a window into the variety. Latter-day Saints kneel as families. Catholics pray the rosary. Protestants join hands in prayer circles.

What is actually happening when you pray? On the imaging, something measurable. On the EEG, something synchronized. On the pain scale, something diminished.

Prayer works.

*** end quote ***

Never heard of this before.

Like most of the “factoids” that cross the inet on XTwitter, Book of Faces, or other social media, I have no first hand knowledge of it’s “truth”.

YMMV

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INSPIRATIONAL: Match quality matters more than head start.

Monday, June 22, 2026

<<FROM TWITTER>>
<< EDITOR ADDED DATE 2026-05-09>>

https://x.com/ihtesham2005/status/2053103815482859767?s=20

Ihtesham Ali
@ihtesham2005

*** begin quote ***

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived.

Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear.

His name is David Epstein. The book is called “Range.”

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer’s record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.

*** and ***

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably.

*** and ***

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked.

*** and ***

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another.

*** and ***

Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster.

*** and ***

The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway.

Match quality matters more than head start.

*** end quote ***

Fascinating insight.

So encourage children to try anything and everything.  When they find “their bliss”, then the magic will happen.

Have we been doing so many things wrong for so long?

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HEALTH: Be aware of government policy failures that adversely affect your life and loved ones

Sunday, June 21, 2026

https://www.malone.news/p/the-absurdity-of-public-health?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=583200&post_id=197494819&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=3snn7d&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The Absurdity of Public Health
Serving power, not the public
Dr. Robert W. Malone
May 13, 2026

 

 

 

*** begin quote ***

The fixation on backyard chickens, raw milk, masking rituals, playground closures, or endlessly sanitized consumer guidance is not primarily about reducing the largest drivers of disease and death. If it were, public health agencies would spend far more time confronting the catastrophic consequences of ultra-processed food, metabolic dysfunction, pharmaceutical overprescribing, hospital-acquired infections, sedentary lifestyles, environmental toxicity, and the economic incentives that quietly fuel chronic disease.

But those are structurally difficult problems. They implicate large institutions, politically connected industries, government policy failures, and decades of bureaucratic complicity.

*** end quote ***

It would seem that until “We, The Sheeple” recognize that “court intellectuals” are just Gooferment propaganda dressed up in a white coat of a doctor or scientist.  

How can they DEMAND health improvements in the things that cause real harm?

It seems to me that honest measurements taken by real people are the answer.

Where did we find the honest answers about the clot shot?  The morticians reporting long fiberous coagulated blood clots in the dead. The few honest doctors who were silenced for calling <synonym for excrement from a male cow> on masks and social 6’ distancing that were lessons from the Spanish Flu Epidemic.  Bloggers, podcasters, and individuals  who reported and tracked data.

Argh!

And, what did we get from the Gooferment?  Misinformation, disinformation, and wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to Big Pharma, politicians, and bureaucrats.

Argh!

We have to focus on the results that we can see:  almost everyone’s obese, real food if available is hideously expensive, illegal immigration is draining resources, welfare is creating a fourth generation of “welfare farmers”,  crime is out of control with many relating offenders, and —  by the way —  children can’t read or do simple math. 

So we have to start holding politicians and bureaucrats accountable for results; not promises.

Argh!

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INSPIRATIONAL: Dale Schroeder puts Big Charity to shame

Saturday, June 20, 2026

<<FROM TWITTER>>
<< EDITOR ADDED DATE 2026-06-06>>

https://x.com/CrazyVibes_1/status/2063349933110104394?s=20

*** begin quote ***

Image

“Blue collar Iowa carpenter used his secret fortune to send 33 strangers to college”. Upworthy

*** end quote ***

Appears to be real.  And if it is, he puts all the Big Charity to shame.

Gant, Michelle (July 25, 2019). “Blue collar Iowa carpenter used his secret fortune to send 33 strangers to college”. Upworthy. Retrieved March 28, 2026.

Dona Nobis Pacem

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GOVEROTRAGEOUS: Put an end to the that happened to Massie

Friday, June 19, 2026

https://lwvc.org/position/position-campaign-financing/

*** begin quote ***

In the summer of 2012, the League ran radio ads in Tennessee and Maine asking Senators Corker, Alexander, Snowe and Collins to support campaign finance reform. The ads were made possible through a grant from the Unitarian Universalist Church at Shelter Rock in Long Island, NY. The ads were timed in anticipation of Congressional action on the DISCLOSE Act. The ads garnered press coverage from outlets in both states.

Today the League continues to push for legislation to protect and reinvigorate the public financing system for president. In addition, the League continues to work to reinvigorate the dysfunctional Federal Election Commission (FEC) which has refused to enforce the law.

*** end quote ***

I have some suggestion for Federal Gooferment campaign restrictions:

  • Only campaign contributions from eligible registered voters in the district.  (Limited to $1,000)
  • NO corporation contributions.  (Could be implemented by making it a tax event.)
  • NO Political Action Committee contributions or advertising for a candidate.
  • NO contributions from foreign governments.
  • Violations are sentenced to a minimum of one year in prison and barred from future campaigns.

That should put an end to the <synonym for excrement> that happened to Massie.

Argh!

Ask me how I really feel!

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